DocOnline

Inspiration

Hi I’m Dr. Anu and I’m a Children’s Dentist. The problem I face at work is it’s my professional duty to be available to my patients should they have an emergency. But I also don’t want to be disturbed in the middle of the night for a silly question like “bobby lost a baby tooth what should I do?”. During my residency, believe it or not, we used pagers! Yea, talk about outdated technology! So the alternative was to actually give patients our personal phone numbers, which also is problematic because then we have no privacy.

What it does

So our team designed an app which uses Trulio to assign a unique phone number to the dentist and patients. The patients do not need the app on their phone- they can text directly to the number they save as Dr. Anu. I have the app on my phone. They can text me with any emergency they may have, and Watson triages at a basic level using a search for certain keywords and may send an automated response to the patient while leaving the patient’s message in my inbox as a low priority message if it really isn’t an emergency. If it is an emergency, the message arrives in my inbox as high priority and I’m alerted. I can formulate my response, I can ask the patient to send me pictures or videos of the situation and let them know right away what to do. This app allows the patients peace of mind while protecting the Doctors privacy.

How we built it

We use Twilio to assign each patient a virtual number and also the doctor. This way the real phone numbers are never revealed. We use HTML5 for demo purposes. IBM Watson for triage of the cases. Radix for the domain.

Challenges we ran into

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Slick UI and easy to use app.

What we learned

What's next for DocOnline

Try it on Dr. Anuhya's patients. Get the app connected with live patiente records so that doctors can search and start talking to patients from the app!